About Us

Actipro Software
is a leading provider of .NET user interface controls for the WPF, UWP, Silverlight, and WinForms frameworks,
and is most well-known for their SyntaxEditor syntax-highlighting code editor control.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 2 of 2010 we had several major product releases.

WPF Studio 2010.1 was launched, which added the new Views for WPF product, made numerous enhancements to various WPF control products, updated all products to target .NET 3.5 SP1, and added Visual Studio 2010 integration.

Silverlight Studio, our new bundle of controls for the Silverlight 4 platform, was also launched. It contains ports of our popular SyntaxEditor code editor control and the new Views for WPF product, along with other useful controls and components found in its Shared Library.

Finally, we relaunched WPFpedia.com, our 100% free community resource guide for WPF developers. It is written using the latest web technologies and allows you to easily find information on nearly any WPF development-related topic on the web.

What’s coming next

Now that we are past the Silverlight Studio release, we’re jumping back on adding new features and enhancements to our existing WPF products for a while. We have a lot of updates planned over the coming weeks so stay tuned to our blog for details.

For a high-level list of what we’ll be working on, please see the July 2010 newsletter that will be posted shortly.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter. More...

Live Demo and Free Evaluation

We encourage you to download a free evaluation of the suite and try it out in Visual Studio 2010 or Blend. Note that if you use VS 2010, you must have the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 installed from Microsoft.

We wanted to squeeze one last feature into SyntaxEditor for Silverlight (our upcoming code editor control) before locking down the code for RTM. I’m pleased to announce that nearly all the IntelliPrompt completion list functionality found in the WPF version of SyntaxEditor will be available in the Silverlight version!

Let’s see an example…

Here we are editing code in SyntaxEditor and press Ctrl+Space. This opens the completion list. The completion list is populated via a language service, meaning that each language implementation decides what to show and when, generally by examining AST data for the document. In this sample, we hard-coded some values.

Once the completion list was opened, I typed an underscore character and the first item matched on that typed text so it became highlighted. Note that a description tip appeared next to the selected item, giving more detail about it. Description tips are fully customizable and can be built using our custom mini-HTML formatting language, or by inserting Silverlight controls directly.

Note that there are a number of filter buttons and tabs in this completion list sample. You can click those buttons and tabs to filter out items that are presented in the list. I will uncheck the Method button and will select the Public members tab. This means that methods will no longer be shown and only public members will be displayed. Let’s see the result:

That is really neat because it updates live. Note that use of the filter buttons and/or tabs is completely optional. Since we filtered out the item that was matched by our typed text, the top item is now partially selected.

I hope this gives you a quick introduction to some of the upcoming SyntaxEditor for Silverlight’s completion list UI capabilities. Just imagine what you can do with these features in a Silverlight-based online IDE!

This all will be available in the coming days when Silverlight Studio goes RTM! Continue watching our blog for details.

We’re very close now to having a Silverlight Studio closed beta test ready to go, probably in the next several days!

Here’s a screenshot taken yesterday:

Some things to note… Silverlight Studio comes with complete menu/menuitem/contextmenu set of controls, a toolbar control, and custom styles for buttons. Not only that but they come in the default Aero theme, along with the 3 Office 2010 themes. We even have a ThemeManager that lets you switch these themes dynamically at run-time.

Closed beta test

We’re currently working on the deployment scripts and finishing up some final items before the first closed beta test is ready. We expect this to be ready in the next several days.

This first beta will be a closed beta test, meaning that you will have to sign up to participate. Note that documentation topics will likely not be available in this first beta test, however there will be a complete set of samples and much of the WPF Studio documentation on similar products applies to Silverlight Studio products.

While the closed beta test is going on, we will be finalizing things such as documentation, designer functionality, etc., in preparation for a public beta release.

Signing up for the closed beta test

If you are interested in participating in the closed beta test, please email our sales address with:

Your name and e-mail address

Company

Which other Actipro products you own

What interests you most about Silverlight Studio

What you plan to do with Silverlight Studio products

Which other products you’d like to see implemented in Silverlight (in priority order)

Please only sign up if you are willing to use the products immediately and provideconstructive feedback.

We have been working very hard on finishing up our upcoming Actipro Silverlight Studio suite over the past several months. I wanted to share a screenshot of where it’s at and give some status updates.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight

The biggest part of Silverlight Studio is SyntaxEditor for Silverlight. It is a port of our popular SyntaxEditor for WPF control, which is an extremely powerful and customizable code editing control similar to the VS 2010 code editor.

Once this control is out, you will have the ability to create online IDEs, since you’ll have a syntax-highlighting editor control that will work in any browser that supports Silverlight and has advanced features like code outlining, custom adornments (squiggles, inline images, etc.), parsing, and much more.

I just opened a 2MB C# file from my hard drive and it opened immediately, ready for editing, and with full syntax highlighting active.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight is very near code complete for its first release now. We tackled the biggest open remaining issues this week. There are just a few minor things left to do.

As you can see from the screenshot, the very first version will ship with over 40 individual samples for SyntaxEditor alone.

Views for Silverlight

Silverlight Studio will also ship with Views for Silverlight, which is a port of our Views for WPF product. Views includes a number of panels that make it easy to create fluid animations of child elements, along with a new ZapPanel control, and some more new panels on the way soon.

Views for Silverlight is all ready to go for the Silverlight Studio launch.

Shared Library

Our Silverlight Shared Library has some helpful controls built into it such as a fully working Menu, MenuItem, and ContextMenu setup. It also has a port of our transition controls that are found in WPF Studio. We’ll talk more about these and more soon.

What’s left to do?

We are currently working on a last couple minor features for SyntaxEditor. Then we need to finish some of the intro documents and feature lists for the products. Once we have our deployment code written, we will post a live demo of Silverlight Studio on our site so that you can try it out.

We will likely then open up closed beta testing to customers who contact us. During that testing period we’ll be working on documentation, web site pages, and doing some other finishing touches.

Summary

We’re really excited about this upcoming products, and based on our customer feedback, you are too. It won’t be long now before we can post something on our site for you to try. Keep an eye on our blog as we’ll post here as more information becomes available.

We recently released WPF Studio 2010.1, which includes the new Views for WPF product. This product includes several panels that uses various fluid animations on the associated child elements. This means you can have fade in/out as they are added/removed from the panel, or smoothly transition to a new position/size.

Panels

WPF comes with several built-in panels and we've included drop-in replacements for some of these, with more to come in the future. We also included a couple panels not found in WPF, that can make your application more attractive. The SwitchPanel can be used to dynamically change the layout logic without having to move the elements to a new parent or regenerate the container elements. The ZapPanel works like a StackPanel, but centers a focal item in the view and can wrap items to produce a circular effect.

A ListBox using a ZapPanel as its ItemsPanel

The full list of panels includes:

AnimatedCanvas - Represents a panel that positions child elements using explicit coordinates that are relative to the panel.

AnimatedDockPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements either horizontally or vertically, relative to each other.

AnimatedStackPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, either horizontally or vertically.

AnimatedWrapPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, breaking content to the next row or column at the edge of the containing box.

SwitchPanel - Represents a panel that delegates the positioning of the child elements to one or more child panels.

ZapPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, while keeping a focal item centered in the view.

You can build custom panels that leverage the fluid animations and framework just as easily as before. We provide step-by-step instructions on building a "random" panel, that arranges it's child elements at random locations. The full source code, in C# and VB.NET, for the random panel is included in our Sample Browser.

Animations

There are several built-in animations that can be easily configured. Elements of the panel can be animated differently depending on whether they were just added, removed, or simply changing location/size. Do you want to zoom in elements from the background when they are added and them zoom them out when being removed? No problem. Do you want to have them rotate a bit as they zoom? That's easy to add.

Custom animations can be created, so you can fully customize how elements are animated. The Views panels leverage native WPF animations, such as DoubleAnimation, so you don't need to learn a new animation framework. You just need to return a Storyboard for a given element based on it's current state.

Silverlight

The Views for Silverlight product, which has not been released yet, was developed in parallel with the View for WPF product. Therefore, the framework is largely compatible across WPF and Silverlight. This allows you easily port any custom panels over to Silverlight later.

Summary

The Views for WPF product can be easily added to your WPF applications to give them a little flair. We will be adding more new custom panels in the near future. If you have any suggestions, please email us.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 1 of 2010 we added some very major new features to SyntaxEditor for WPF: complete code outlining support, hidden regions, intra-text adornments, and IME support. Navigation for WPF saw the addition of a ZoomContentControl, which allows you to scroll through large content easily.

What’s coming next

We have been a little quieter on the blog the past couple months but that’s because we’ve been hard at work trying to prep WPF Studio 2010.1 so that it’s ready to go the week of Visual Studio 2010’s release in mid-April. WPF Studio 2010.1 will be moving to target .NET 3.5 SP1 and we will be including sample projects in VS 2010 format, optionally with VS 2008 format as well.

We have some big updates to our existing products, some of which we’ll give some more info on as we get closer to launch.

We are going to be launching a new WPF control product with WPF Studio 2010.1 too.

We also have been building up our product infrastructure for a Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle. This has taken a while but we are plugging through it and hope to get a public beta out in the May timeframe. The first version will include SyntaxEditor for Silverlight and a Silverlight version of the unnamed new product.

Finally, we are very close to having a re-launch of our wpfpedia.com WPF resource guide site ready. We’re really excited about it and we think you will be too when you get to see and use it. The new design is very “web 2.0”.

Keep an eye on our blog for more details on all of the above.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter. More...

We’ve been getting a lot of e-mails asking about what we’re currently working on, when new releases are planned, etc. So I’d like to give an update on our plans for the next couple months.

WPF Studio 2010.1

We’re working hard on WPF Studio 2010.1. Our plan is to have it out in the April or May 2010 timeframe at the latest. Here are some of the updates we have planned for it:

Target .NET 3.5 SP1

As mentioned in a previous blog post, WPF Studio 2010.1 will move to target .NET 3.5 SP1. This will enable us to take advantage of new features that aren’t available in .NET 3.0.

Source codebase move to VS 2010

All our source code for WPF Studio will be moved to VS 2010 projects.

VS 2010 sample projects

WPF Studio 2009.2 ships with VS 2008 projects that can be converted to VS 2010 format when they are opened in VS 2010. Our designer functionality in 2009.2 already has been designed to function in VS 2010 properly. However to make things easier for customers, we will ship VS 2010 and VS 2008 variations of the sample projects in WPF Studio 2010.1, thereby saving you from having to run the project conversion in VS.

New WPF control product

A brand new WPF control product is being developed that will ship with WPF Studio 2010.1. We’re pretty excited about it and will give some more information on it when we get closer to release.

Ribbon updates

We’re working on updates for the Ribbon control to make it look more like Office 2010. In addition, the glow effects in the title bar will be created with shader effects since the bitmap effects we previously used are no longer supported in .NET 4.0.

SyntaxEditor updates

The ability to create and support multiple highlighting style registries has been added. This means that you can have one registry set up for general code editing, another for console windows, etc.

Miscellaneous

Other miscellaneous updates will be included for various products.

Silverlight Studio 2010.1

We’re excited to finally be bringing to market some Silverlight controls. They will initially be released in a new Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle, due out when or soon after WPF Studio 2010.1 is released.

What’s included?

The first Silverlight Studio version will include a beta release of our SyntaxEditor control, and a Silverlight version of the new unnamed product that is being added in WPF Studio 2010.1. There also is a Silverlight Shared Library that has a bunch of helpful common components and controls.

Silverlight 3 or 4?

Right now our code is being developed for SL3, but we may switch to SL4 if it is released before Silverlight Studio is ready to go. This could add a small delay in our release date but we’d much rather support the latest and greatest, especially since SL4 will enable us to support some additional SyntaxEditor functionality in the future that we can’t do in SL3.

Building a product infrastructure

We’re currently working on building a product infrastructure for Silverlight that helps aid in code compatibility between Silverlight and WPF. Since this is the first time we’re getting into Silverlight, we’ve had to construct a new product licensing mechanism, a new control theming mechanism, and other infrastructure items needed to support a set of quality commercial controls.

We’ve been building a new Sample Browser for our Silverlight controls too, similar to our WPF Sample Browser. We’ll try and get some screenshots posted soon.

WPFpedia.com reimplementation

We have been planning a complete reimplementation of our wpfpedia.com reference guide site for a while now. It will become a completely separate web site from our main Actipro site and has been rebuilt from scratch using ASP MVC and the latest web technologies to provide the ideal place for you to go when trying to learn how to do something in WPF.

More news on this very soon!

Summary

As you can see, there are a lot of items on our plate right now but we’re chugging through them. 2010 is going to be an exciting time for us and our customers, especially with the new development tools like Visual Studio 2010 coming our way shortly.